At most professional workstations in enterprises, you will see dual monitor setups on people’s desks.
A few years or even a decade ago, it made sense to extend the widely spread single 24-inch monitor setup, which was indeed too cramped to check your emails/notifications and work on your tasks simultaneously.
So businesses had increasingly adopted dual or multi-screen setups to increase the productivity of their workforce. More screen real estate, achieved easily.
Or so people thought, until the compromises started to become visible.
Regional Sales Director, AOC and Philips Monitors in the UK/Ireland.
You see, you will have to work with twice the video cabling, twice the power cables, twice the power consumption.
If a dual-monitor setup is from different brands or models of displays, it was also not guaranteed that you will have the same resolution, same colour grading, same brightness or contrast, so it was a “stop-gap” solution to simply offer more space back then. And it worked, kind of.
In the meantime, the display market changed quite a lot. Ultrawide monitors, with a 21:9 aspect ratio, initially featured in the gaming scene for their increased immersion in games and movies, found their way into the business sector.
Even wider displays, with a 32:9 aspect ratio became more and more popular, since they can replace exactly two 16:9 usual monitors, with no bezel in between, offering a fully usable horizontal landscape.
In certain sectors, such as video editing and music production, where users work with long timelines, or in banking and commerce, where office workers use long and detailed spreadsheets, the entire workflow benefits from more horizontal real estate.
In my mind, I see five main topics why today businesses need to shift towards a single ultrawide or superwide display instead of multi-screen setups.
Bezels that distract
In a usual dual monitor setup, you set up the desk with two 16:9 displays side by side and place the chair in the middle of both displays to have an equal distance away from the screens. But this initial alignment already causes the first and biggest distraction.
In the middle of your central field of view, you will see the right bezel of the left screen, and vice versa. Your primary focus area is filled with bezels, in older displays even as thick as several centimeters.
If you want to use both monitors with a single program at once, such as a long spreadsheet or a video/audio timeline, this “bezel” issue alone breaks your focus and productivity, making following rows or timelines more difficult than a single monitor setup.
(Non-)Ergonomics that hurt
Dual setups usually mean one of two things. Either, both displays are placed side by side with a straight angle. Which means, your eyes will have more distance towards the side edges than towards the center of your field of view. Or they both are slightly angled towards the center .
In both cases, you will either keep twisting your neck left and right all day long, or you will work off axis for hours. To make matters worse, if none of the dual monitors offer an ergonomic, height-adjustable stand, with tilt and swivel capabilities, you will often try to readjust them to your posture.
A single, curved, ultrawide or superwide display simply keeps equal distance to your eyes from the sides or the center, and its curve matches the natural curvature of your eyes.
Panels that don’t match
In a dual setup, you will try to install two identical business monitors on a single desk. If that is not possible, there are even bigger issues to deal with. If one has a different resolution or size, you will lose the uniformity between extended screens. Texts may be differently scaled, and it is quite a distraction to move windows and programs between the two displays.
If we assume that “identical” units are set-up side-by-side, the fact that they are “identical” models alone cannot guarantee the same brightness, gamma, contrast and other visual features, since all panels in most manufacturers can show some kind of variation between panels, sometimes very little, sometimes more significant.
Some monitors offer features such as “Sync” or “Link” the displays to make them appear as uniform as possible. But, by definition, a single ultrawide or superwide panel, simply is uniform and eliminates these concerns completely.
Complexity of scales
With a dual monitor setup, you will need space for two stands on the desk, two power bricks on the floor, two power sockets, more video cables and more clutter, better video cards with more video outputs.
With even larger multi-screen setups, this increases linearly and can become costly, distracting and simply clutters the workspace, when it needs to be clean and minimalistic to allow users to focus on the task at hand. A single ultrawide or superwide display simply cuts the multitude of cables and all the requirements to just one connection to the workstation.
Modern business-focused 21:9 or 32:9 displays also feature KVM switches, USB-C or Thunderbolt 4 connectivity with Power Delivery, built-in USB hubs and even DisplayPort outputs thanks to the additional space on the back for these features. The USB-C or TB4 connectivity allow easy charging of connected laptops or smartphones while also extending the display, using the same cable.
Some fully-fledged docking models also include a built-in webcam with Windows Hello easy login, and/or a RJ-45 input to route the network connection to the computers plugged in with USB to the monitor.
In short, with a modern large ultrawide/superwide display you can replace even more peripherals than just a single extra monitor.
Cost of ownership
Bringing two panels to each desk directly means double the procurement, double the power consumption, double the devices the IT department needs to check, support, replace – multiplied across every desk in an enterprise. It can get costly and quickly unmanageable.
Employing “older” displays in a dual-monitor setup as a stop-gap solution becomes unsustainable in a short time with consumption figures easily doubling.
A new ultrawide or superwide display with sustainability features built-in, such as a presence sensor, or a light sensor to adjust its consumption automatically, not only offers a much more comfortable usage for the workforce but also reduces the consumption figures for years to come.
Two monitors solved yesterday’s problem at twice the cost. The businesses that are at the head of the game are the ones that have realized that one great big screen has always been the right answer from the start.
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This article was produced as part of TechRadar Pro Perspectives, our channel to feature the best and brightest minds in the technology industry today.
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